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The
first sketch for “Andorra” consists of a short story published by
Frisch in his “Diary 1946-49” and entitled “The Andorran Jew.” In Andorra (it begins) there once lived a young man who was
thought by everyone to be a Jew: “to
explain why, the alleged story of his birth must be related, his
everyday behavior among the Andorrans, and the ready-made image that was
everywhere expected of him.” He
had a keen intelligence, and he worried, like most Andorrans, about
money. The tale continues:
“The young man sensed what the
Andorrans thought of him; he examined his conscience to see whether he
really did always think of money. It
was true, he did. But he
discovered that he was not ashamed of it.
The Andorrans said nothing, but looked at each other knowingly.
The young man also realized that his fellow-Andorrans found him
lacking in patriotism. If
he was ever bold enough to use the word, they acted as if he had
contaminated it. The fact
was that the Andorrans knew that a Jew chooses, or rather buys, his
country; he is never born to it as other man are.
No matter how much he tried to concern himself with the problems
of Andorra, he was always faced by a wall of silence, a wall of
cotton-wool . . .
“He saw that Andorra indisputably belonged to others.
No one expected him to love it; in fact, the more he tried to do
so, the more suspicious people became.
Any advances he made were seen as attempts to curry favor, even
if no apparent advantage could be discerned.
When he questioned himself about his patriotic feelings, he
discovered that the word patriotism (which caused such embarrassment
whenever he used it) meant nothing to him; he even disliked it.
The Andorrans were obviously right; he was incapable of love for
his country in their sense of the word . . .
“True, the Andorrans found his company stimulating, but they
were never comfortable in his presence.
Although he tired to escape being different, he could not succeed
in being like other people. Hence he flaunted his dissimilarity with a kind of defiant
pride, behind which hostility lurked.
To his awareness of being different he joined an extravagant show
of politeness; yet even his most considerate behavior stuck others
almost as a reproach, as if he were blaming them that he was a Jew.
“Most Andorrans did him no harm.
“Nor
did they help him.”
“There
were, of course, some Andorrans of a liberal, progressive outlook, with
what they liked to call a humane attitude.
These (as they never failed to protest) respected the Jew
precisely because of his typically Jewish qualities—the astuteness of
his mind, and so forth. They were ready to stand by him until his end—an end so
cruel and abhorrent that it shocked even those who had never realized
how cruel his life had been. Needless
to say they didn’t exactly mourn him; to be quite frank, they didn’t
even miss him; but they were outraged by his death—especially by the
manner of it.
“They talked about it until, one
day, something was revealed which the dead man himself could not have
known. He had been a
foundling, whose parents were not discovered until long after; an
Andorran, like everyone else.
“After
this, they talked of him no more.
“But
ever after, when they looked in the mirror, they saw with dismay that
each of them bore the lineaments of Judas.”
In
the dramatized version, the young protagonist (Andri) is not a
foundling. He is a bastard,
passed off by his father (an Andorran) as a Jewish refugee whom he has
bravely smuggled out of the neighboring country of the Blacks, where
anti-Semitism is rampant. The
play shows the supposed Jew embracing the Jewishness that Andorra has
thrust upon him. Society
proves stronger than heredity. Even
when he is told that his Jewishness is illusory, he cannot repudiate the
Jewish role in which Andorra has irrevocably cast him.
He says to the priest: “Ever
since I have been able to hear, people have told me I’m different, and
I watched to see if what they said was true.
And it is true, Reverend Father, I am different . . . I’m old.
My trust has fallen out, one piece after another, like teeth.
I have exulted; the sun shone green in the trees, I threw my name
in the air like a cap that belonged to nobody but me, and down fell a
stone that killed me.”
notes
on the play--Max Frisch
It is too easy, and generally fatal, for all of us to fall in with other
people’s ideas of us and so lose our own identity.
In a way “Andorra” is an illustration of the commandment:
“Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image.”
I don’t think we can avoid
setting up images of other people and expecting them to conform; this
is, in effect, the only practical way of managing human relationships,
because to grasp all the complexities and contradictions of all, or even
several, of the people we know would make life too difficult.
Perhaps
it is possible only with one: the
person we love. Falling out
of love is essentially the process of hardening all the surprises and
contradictions of the loved one into one unsurprising image.
We can’t help putting people into categories, but at the same
time we all bear the guilt of doing so.
We even put ourselves in categories; we invent
ourselves, and then use this invented self as a work hypothesis to cover
the facts of our lives. This
is why even the most objective account of life can only be a fiction,
and one of many possibilities.
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